Tag: Masamune Shirow

Story and art by Masamune Shirow
Translation by Dana Lewis and Toren Smith
Lettering and retouch by Tom Orzechowski

After finishing the first two books of Appleseed, Shirow decided to try his hand at lighter fare. The result was Dominion, a series which has humorous moments, but which isn't a comedy by any means.

In the bacteria-ravaged environment of Newport City, Police Sergeant Leona Ozaki and the Tank Police relentlessly pursue the notorious Buaku gang. But when Buaku kidnaps Crolis Greenpeace, an artifical life form designed to clean the atmosphere, he graduates from nuisance to global threat...

Dominion is a queer duck. On one hand, Shirow wants it to be a light-hearted action comedy where cute mini-tanks chase each other through the city. On the other hand, he wants it to be a serious ecological story that scolds humanity for ruining the environment. Unfortunately, the two halves never quite meet. The environmental aspects seem shoehorned into the story — it's strange to see the police so concerned with matters well out of their jurisdiction. The action comedy is a lot more appealing, but it degenerates into more serious-minded action in the final act, which doesn't quite mesh with everything that's come earlier.

It says a lot about Shirow's artistic development that Dominion seems far more cartoonish than Appleseed, even though the drawings are far more detailed. They key is simplified, open panel compositions, combined with less realistic character designs and more exaggerated poses. Here's a sample...

Dominion, p. 8

There's more linework here than in Shirow's earlier work, but because each panel composition is boiled down to the bare essentials — just Leona or Buaku — the results feel less cramped and more open. The storytelling is equally simple, alternating between shots of Leona and Buaku, each of whom gets one side of the page all to themselves.

Dominion also features the lettering of Tom Orzechowski, possibly the only person crazy enough to touch up compositions which feature transparent letters over fine hatching and forests of speed lines. His goofy hand-lettered sound effects help create the light-hearted tone of the early chapters. In these days when most manga sound effects go completely untranslated, it's nice to see an example where the translated sound effects actually enhance the story. Sometimes, that extra effort is worth it.

I'd say more, but Dominion really isn't strong enough to support a more complex analysis. Ultimately, it's a diverting but hardly memorable comic. Its sequel, however, is another matter entirely...

Dominion: Tank Police OVAs

In 1988, Toshiba produced a four-part straight-to-video Dominion prequel. If anything, the OVAs are even less coherent than the comics. The police torture suspects with grenades, take potshots at the soft-on-crime mayor, and casually blow up buildings — which we're supposed to laugh at. There's a secret government project to change the nature of the human race, and an insinuation that a-bombs would make effective police tools — which we're supposed to take seriously. Buaku's origin is revealed — and we're supposed to feel sorry for him. It could all work if the series went over the top, but it doesn't have the balls. Instead, we're left with an incoherent mess that tries to push all of your buttons and fails. Of all the adaptations of Shirow's work, the Dominion OVAs are easily the weakest, and that's saying quite a lot.

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Book One: "The Promethean Challenge"Book Two: "Prometheus Unbound"

Story and art by Masamune Shirow
Translation by Dana Lewis and Toren Smith
Lettering and retouch by L. Lois Buhalis and John Clark

There was a time when Appleseed was considered Masamune Shirow's magnum opus (these days, he's more closely associated with Ghost in the Shell). As his first professional work, it's not nearly as published as it should be — but the first two volumes, at least, have held up over the years.

Appleseed is set in a future that's been devastated by a protracted world war. When the war ends, the world begins to rebuild under the direction of Olympus, a city which claims to be the last hope of the human race.

Olympus is loosely based on Plato's Republic. The populace enjoys virtually unlimited personal freedoms and material comforts, but has no say in the government. Instead, key decisions are made by a Council of philosophers and enforced by a guardian caste. In Shirow's version, the the philosopher and guardian castes are not drawn from the human population — instead, they're composed of "bioroids," genetically engineered to rule. In theory, the bioroids should be freed from base material desires and capable of operating as a single unit to enforce the will of the state. In practice they seem all too human — driven by conflicting personalities and engaged in bureaucratic turf wars.1

The first two books of Appleseed throw Olympus into a series of crises that call its long-term feasibility into question. In "The Promethean Challenge," the challenge comes from below. A group of human refugees conclude that while the comforts the Olympian system offers are mere distractions — the city has robbed them their ability to set their own destinies. Led by a terrorist named Chiffon, they try to destroy Gaia, the supercomputer they (falsely) believe is running the show. In "Prometheus Unbound," the challenges come from above. Chiffon's revolt forces the council to conclude that human nature is incompatible with the Olympian system. Their proposal to curtail freedom and regulate thought paralyzes the bioroid population — it might be the only hope for the human race, or it might destroy human nature itself. Meanwhile, the Gaia observes the debate and decides that the bioroids have abandoned their mission, and unleashes an army of robot gun platforms to destroy them.

We experience Olympus through the eyes of Deunan Knute and Briareos Hecatonchires, two special forces soldiers who've been surviving out in "badside." One day they're visited by a young bioroid named Hitomi, who brings them back to Olympus,2 and by chance they wind up embroiled in both of the above conflicts. Deunan and Briareos are incurable skeptics — they don't buy into the Council's lofty ideals, but aren't persauded by Chiffon's revolutionary rhetoric or Gaia's meticulous reasoning, either. When they're placed in a situation where the fate of Olympus rests in their hands, they're finally forced to choose sides. In the end, they prove to be realists. Olympus may ultimately be a dead-end — but half a chance is better than none.

Appleseed is a definite improvement over Black Magic. Shirow's dialogue is still filled with technobabble and philosophical posturing, but the philosophy is integral to the story rather than a meaningless aside. The characters are more sharply defined, with goals and motivations that make sense given what we know of their past. Furthermore, the story successfully functions on two levels — casual reader can ignore all of the Olympian politics and focus on the killer robots, while those interested in a deeper experience are more likely to be entertained by Shirow's philosophical meanderings. That's not to say that Appleseed is without flaws. Shirow can be unfortunately obtuse — even after multiple readings, it's can be hard to figure exactly what's going on. He's also in love with his own technology, and has a tendency to keep dragging it out to the detriment of the story.3 And the plot itself has some strange contrivances that test the limits of believability — in particular the climax, where Deunan must fire an apple seed into a comically oversized circuit breaker to stop Gaia's rampage.4

Artistically, Appleseed is a huge step forward for Shirow. His underlying style hasn't changed much — a side by side comparison of Deunan and Typhon would show little difference — but his compositions are greatly improved. The increase in the amount of detail he provides is amazing — his panels ar efilled with thousands of speed lines and tiny pieces of debris — and yet he picks his details so well that few of them are extraneous. His mechanical designs, which were lackluster in Black Magic, really come to life in the cyborgs and robots of Olympus. And yet...

Appleseed, Book 2, p. 128

This sequence from "Prometheus Unbound" illustrates Shirow's virtues and flaws. The individual panels are remarkable images — the image of the gun platform shooting up a city street is a dynamic, exciting composition. The design of the gun platform gives it a lot of personality. The rendering is phenomenal — every piece of shrapnel and debris seems to be rendered in exquisite detail. And yet, the actions don't flow from one panel to the next, and while individual panels have great depth. there's no overall sense of the space these actions are taking place in. The individual character poses seem a bit stiff, which works for Kotus and Briareos but not for the human characters. Everything is inked with the same fine line, which makes it hard to pick out the important elements and dilutes the impact of the compositions.

Overall, Appleseed remains one of Shirow's most enjoyable works — a blend of action and philosophy that's still enjoyable today.

Appleseed OVA

In 1988 Kazuyoshi Katayama directed a straight-to-video adaption of the first two volumes of Appleseed. Katayama manged to cover the key plot points of both volumes, but seems to have missed the point — the politics and philosophy are pushed into the background to give us more shots of Deunan blowing things up and Hitomi in her underwear. The animation is also a bit underwhelming, and the style hasn't aged well. A computer-animated Appleseed film is scheduled for release later this year; hopefully it'll capture a bit more of the series' charm.

Next:Dominion.

The point, of course, being that there are some desires that social and genetic engineering can't remove. The bioroids might not have any material desires, but they're certainly capable of coveting power and influence. There's also an implication that the bioroids might need these qualities to successfully perform their duties — a dispassionate party is frequently a disinterested party, after all, and conflict prevents stasis.

There's an ulterior motive to Hitomi's recruitment of Deunan and Briareos. It turns out Deunan's father Carl was one of the donors whose DNA was used to create the first generation of bioroids, and the Council is apparently tracking down the donors and their descendants. This is apparently an important plot point, but there's never any payoff, which is frustrating.

Specifically, he keeps trying to justify the existence of "landmates" (robot exo-skeletons). Sure, they look cool, they establish that Olympus has a lot of high-tech toys, and they certainly spice up the action sequences, but it's not like they're integral to the story in any way. Why not use some of that space to explain exactly what a "bioroid" is instead?

And providing a justification for the title, of course. It's such a contrived scene, though, that Shirow would have been better off leaving apple seeds out of it and letting the title stay mysterious.

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For the next month or so, I'll be writing off and on about Masamune Shirow. I'll be posting reviews of his major work (Black Magic, Appleseed, Dominion, Orion and Ghost in the Shell), some opinions about his artistry and his approach to storytelling, and a few thoughts about the various movie and TV adaptations of Ghost in the Shell.

There's no better place to get started than the beginning...

Story and art by Masamune Shirow
Translation by Alan Gleason and Toren Smith
Lettering and retouch by L. Lois Buhalis

Black Magic is Shirow's first published work, a fan publication (doujin) from the days before he became a professional manga artist. It's quite obviously the work of someone with a great deal of talent and enthusiasm — and no practical experience.

In the world of Black Magic the people of Venus are governed by the powerful supercomputer Nemesis, who enforces its decisions with the aid of genetically-engineered "executors." When Zeus, the leader of the executors, attempts to seize power for himself, Nemesis unleshes the ultimate executor — Duna Typhon — to stop him once and for all. Sound familiar? It should. It's the same set-up as Appleseed — a government loosely modeled on Plato's Republic, run by "bioroids" who may no longer have the best interests of the human population at heart, and driven by internicene conflicts loosely based on Greek myth.

Black Magic is divided into three chapters, with a prologue and and epilogue. The prologue introduces Typhon and her rag-tag group of rebels. Of course, they don't actually figure in the next two chapters — "Bowman" is about a Zeus's operatives sabotaging an attempt to terraform Earth, and "Booby Trap" is about a special forces unit trying to stop a trio of ramping robots. Typhon finally steps out from the shadows in the final chapter, "City Light," where she tries (and fails) to prevent Zeus from sabotaging humanity's attempts to leave the solar system. Finally, the epilogue lets us know that everything ends happily — Zeus steps down, Typhon retires, and a year later everyone on Venus is wiped out by a nuclear war.

Maybe it's not that happy.

Black Magic is quite clearly the work of an amateur. The plot structure is weak — it feels like three unrelated short stories shoehorned into a framing sequence, rather than three stories in sequence. The dialogue is full of technobabble and grandiose philosophical posturing. The characters are poorly defined and wooden, and there's little in the way of character development. The beginning, ending, and all other plot twists come entirely out of left field.

One of Shirow's weaknesses as a writer is his tendency to hint rather than show. As a result, one frequently has to read between the lines to understand what's really going on. This can work well if the story is engaging on a surface level — casual readers can enjoy the explosions, while more serious-minded folk can be entertained by the philosophical underpinnings. Unfortunately, there's nothing to see between the lines of Black Magic — there's little insight into the Venusian system of government or the underlying philosophical problems that the Venusians face as a species. Furthermore, the surface level is totally uninteresting — a random string of pointless fight scenes and political posturing.

It's almost impossible to recognize the Masamune Shirow of today in Black Magic's art — the recognizeable aspect is his obsessively complicated mechanical designs. He's not a particularly accomplished draftsman or storyteller at this stage — the art here is serviceable, nothing more.

As a stand-alone work Black Magic fails to entertain. Appleseed readers might find it interesting, if only to see how some of Shirow's earliest ideas were later recycled into better material, but will still find the story lacking.

Black Magic M-66

In 1987 Shirow directed a straight-to-video adaptation of "Booby Trap." To simplify the story he snipped out all of the Venusian politics and added two cute girls for the M-66 to chase around town. Both definite improvements — but the y still couldn't shake the "low-budget Terminator" vibe that permeated the entire project. Do yourself a favor and leave this one on the shelf — rent a quality film like The Snakehead Terror instead.